====== Zephyr ======

Megawatt scale HAWT grid-tie windparks are operating at optimum height in specific areas, with strong and mostly continuous winds. This makes their development, construction and maintenance very labor- and resource-intensive projects and causes much inflexibility in the process of finding a suitable  location for deployment and operation.


{{:lab:hawt_windpark_by_lars_schmidt.jpg?nolink&645}}


Zephyr, named after the greek god of the West-Wind, is the concept of a small-scale and modular DIY Wind-Harvesting-System, designated to work in low-wind areas, keeping sustainability, efficiency, resilience and safety in mind. 

**Benefits of many small turbines instead of a few big ones:**

  * Redundancy: Failure of a big turbine has more impact than a single small turbine of a group
  * Scalability: Park can grow with more available resources and higher consumption demands
  * Reality: It's easier to build small turbines without specialized machines or cranes to put them up

===== Wind-Park Construction Kit =====

This shall become a draft of common agreements on design principles and common interfaces to keep modularity and development diversity on a high level.


==== Mechanics ====

[[lab:zephyr:mechanics]]


==== Rotor Types ====

All VAWT's seem to have a bad reputation when it comes to conversion efficiency. The most commonly known VAWT's are the Darrieus and Savonius types. However, there are alternative ideas for the vertical axis, like [[http://www.fundamentalform.com/html/involute_wind_turbine.html|Larry Dobson's involute wind turbine]] or the [[http://www.daswindrad.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21|C-Rotor]] concept, which has the advantage of being tested and developed by a strong community.

[[lab:zephyr:rotors]]

==== Generators ====

[[lab:zephyr:generators]]


==== Smart-Grid ====

[[lab:zephyr:smartgrid]]


==== Electronics ====

[[lab:zephyr:electronics]]


===== Prototyping =====

We want to make small-scale wind technology available to everyone, so that more people can experiment with this technology. TiVA, the Tiny Vertical Axis project is aiming to give people a very modular but complete small-scale VAWT 
to try out new technologies.

[[lab:zephyr:tiva]]

{{tag>zephyr wind energy research}}